Agran loss bodes well for Irvine

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I couldn't be everywhere Election Night, so I focused on two areas that I've long focused on: Irvine and

Costa Mesa, cities with highly divisive political factions whose election outcomes will have an impact beyond their borders. In both cities, the forces of better government won, although in Costa Mesa it was close.

In Irvine,
Steven Choi's victory over
Larry Agran for mayor was at once stunning and heartening. Agran and
Beth Krom are now in the minority. Forming the majority I'm counting on to put an end to the Great Park madness is Choi, slate-mate co-winner
Christina Shea and holdover Councilman
Jeff Lalloway.

Agran's demise was the accumulation of several factors. Political consultants will tell you his “negatives” have been high for years. They grew higher as the public increasingly caught onto his shenanigans.

The negatives finally overcame Agran's incredible skills in the black art of campaign finance. That, and the fact that Choi had decent name ID plus money to run a decent campaign, finally defeated Agran. That one can deconstruct it in hindsight doesn't mean Choi's 5 percentage-point victory was anything less than jaw-dropping. Literally.

I was at the Republican Party's party at the Westin South Coast Plaza as the numbers were coming in Tuesday night.
Al Tello took a photo capturing the exact moment that Lalloway told Irvine City Commissioner
Kevin Trussell that Choi had won. Trussell's mouth is so wide open you could drive a giant orange helium-filled balloon into it.

Choi himself was rather inscrutable. He walked around like he knew it was going to happen all along.

The campaign mail was brutal. One Irvine voter I know got a total of 50 pieces.

Agran was up to his usual stuff. For example, as she has in the past, Laguna Beach oil heiress
Anne Getty Earhart kicked in big bucks, this time $49,000 a few days before the election. The money went to an Irvine school-funding measure Agran got on the ballot as a funding mechanism that gets around the city's $440-per-person contribution limit. The campaign literature for those pieces was dominated by statements and photos touting what a swell guy Agran is.

The other side had some pretty good mail of its own. Maybe the most devastating piece featured a photo of D.A.

Tony Rackauckas with this quote: “Larry Agran weakened Irvine's sex-offender ordinance so that most sex offenders are able to roam freely in Irvine's parks.” There was a mug shot of an actual sex offender, plus a grainy photo of Agran, a smiling shot of T-Rack,
and a staged photo of a guy in a hoodie eying a toddler on a jungle gym. It was a
Jim Bieber special if I ever saw one, with Bieber himself portraying the pervert.

“We shot it at the playground down the street,” the hit-mail maestro told me proudly as we chatted at the Westin. (A few days after that piece dropped, Agran got T-Rack to do a robo-call emphasizing that sex offenders were
not actually roaming Irvine's parks.)

So what now with this new Irvine majority? A hard-core performance audit showing how Agran and others burned through most of $200 million in Great Park money with relatively little to show for it would be nice. A recent L.A. Times analysis showed that less than one-fifth the $203 million spent so far went to actual park improvements. (Lalloway says the timing of this front-page piece was also helpful in defeating Agran.) But what about going forward?

For starters, it seems the majority has to cut a deal with FivePoint Communities, the Great Park residential developer, and come up with a realistic five-year spending plan for the park. Well, actually for starters, they need to rein in the existing spending, like the hundreds of thousands that go to Agran's political pals.

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